Also, there is a wiki effort to become a virtual nation state, called AnewGo, although it's quiescent right now.
Finally, I've just begun work on a software inference engine, Parliament, that would assist in the application of parlimentary procedure to an online legislative body. The core engine could also be used as an assistant to humans during a live meeting (which is in fact the way that I'm developing it first).
WikiGateway is a library of functions which allows you to act as a client to a wiki website, executing operations like getPage, putPage, and getRecentChanges. WikiGateway translates your requests into the idiosyncratic HTML form interfaces of various popular wiki servers. The wiki which you are accessing doesn't have to know about WikiGateway; it sees you as just another user. Basically, WikiGateway does Wiki I/O and import/export.
It can be used either as a Perl module or a web service (Atom or XML-RPC). Command-line client coming soon.
Vasters is correct in being skeptical about earning a living off free software; while it can be done, it is not as reliable as it could be. Vasters agrees that free software would be good for society, but sadly concludes that producing it is too impractical in today's world.
But it doesn't have to be. Society already has established institutions for paying people to spend their lives producing information for the public good. The university system.
Free software should be a professional specialty within academia. There should be computer science professors and phD students whose mandate is not to discover only original results, but rather to implement known results well in the form of free software.
Structurally, the economics of free software production are identical to those of science. Both free software and scientific knowledge are "public goods". Once one person produces an piece of information, the marginal cost of reproducing the information is zero, and the knowledge becomes freely available to all. That is why the government finds it worthwhile to give money for the production of scientific knowledge.
Like science, the production of free software is a collaborative venture where publication is central. Like science, the system functions best when individual producers have a substantial amount of creative freedom to choose which projects to work on. Like science, it would be impractical for practitioners to do what is needed on their own, or in their spare time.
It is inefficient for society to reinvent the wheel in terms of funding free software. We shouldn't try to duplicate the university system by creating a separate ecology of free software organizations funding developers, and free software foundations making grants. Free software developers should be employed as professors in the university system.
I predict that the first university to appoint a professor of open source will quickly generate a flurry of publicity, and will, if they choose, become a hub for open source development. Such a move would be immensely attractive to students, as many computer science students intend to be industry programms, and would be better served by hands-on experience as a real team members in a real open-source project than by spending all their time on theory. The universities to appoint professors of open source will see their the quality and quantity of their applicants go way up. A second-tier university might be instantly transformed into a first-tier one, at least as far as the desirability of the computer science department goes.
This won't happen on its own. Although the economics are similar, free software is not research, and there is much competition in universities over what sort of professor to give open spots to. What is needed is a campaign to raise enough money to endow a new chair of computer science. This will be expensive (about a million dollars at the cheaper places). But if we as a community raised 100,000 EUR in just seven weeks to buy Blender, then surely we can raise ten times that amount over the course of a year. But we won't have to keep doing this indefinitely. After there are a couple of free-software professors, the movement will take on momentum in the academic community, and other universities will begin appointing professors with "free software" duties on their own in order to remain competitive.
I am considering starting a fund to collect donations for the endowment of a Chair of Free Software at some university. For the sake of compromise, I think it would be wise to allow the university to require that, beyond teaching, 50% of the professor's time be devoted to traditional computer science research, and 50% to free software efforts. Please let me know if you would be interested; my email can be found on my web page.
Recently I listened to a talk by Alan Kay who mentioned that many 'new' software ideas had already been discovered decades earlier by computer scientists - but 'nobody reads these great papers anymore.' Over the years I have had the opportunity to read some really great and thought-provoking academic papers in Computer Science and would like to read more, but there are just too many to sort through.
Sounds like the sort of problem that a system like CanonicalTomes would be good for. Canonical tomes is for books. Anyone up for making a similar site for "canonical papers"?
Sorry, perhaps I am dense, or I didn't spend enough time looking at Postdoc and Diracian. 3d17 allows people to propose modifications to a document, and then others vote on those modifications. I couldn't find similar functionality in either of these links; postdoc seems to allow modifications but no voting, and I couldn't find anything in Diracian.
If you just want to modify a document without voting, wiki does that just fine. The innovation in 3d17 is that it allows voting on the modifications.
I'm working on something that is functionally similar to "CVS by consensus"; it's a wiki system that applies patches to code only if no-one disagrees. Direct interfacing to CVS is planned in the future, although I don't have much time to develop it right now.
Also, the system is built so that the community can modify the system's own code. It's called "
Community Programmable Wiki".
I think most of the 5s that I read above are missing the point. Many of them answer the question "If you want to teach a kid to program, what do you do?" (and most get even more specific, to "which language?").
When I was little, my dad got an Apple IIc. It came with a bunch of disks. The Apple at Work, The Apple at Play, Introduction, The Inside Story, Exploring Apple Logo, and Getting down to BASIC, among others. These were what got me into programming, particularly the "Getting down to BASIC" disk.
The two best things about the "Getting down to BASIC" tutorial were:
It came with the computer, and I tried out everything that came with the computer.
It was very, very, very friendly.
This is what we are lacking today. Something that most kids will discover on their own that gets them into programming, WITHOUT the influence of an adult in their life to suggest it.
I think we need a well advertised website with a tutorial on it like the Getting Down to BASIC tutorial. A tutorial that you don't have to download or anything; the website has it's own interpreter.
Furthermore, for most of the tutorial you shouldn't even be using the real interpreter yet; in Getting Down to BASIC, most of the time the tutorial would type a line or two of code, and then ask you to finish one word or something.
You weren't really in the BASIC interpreter at all. If you typed the wrong word, it would give you a fake error message and then explain in detail what you did wrong, and ask for another guess. If you made a common mistake, it had a response tailored for that. It also heaped congratulations on you when you did something right. Only near the end would you type in an entire line of code at once or maybe even a whole short program.
I think just telling kids to go use Python is way off. There's like a million steps in between "go learn Python" and writing Hello World. Among them are "download and install Python", "Run the interpreter", "figure out what an "interpreter" is
", "figure out what a "program" is", "find out how to quit out of the interpreter", "figure out why typing "i want you to put my name on the screen" doesn't work, even though i'm saying essentially the same thing as they are saying in the tutorial, overcome confusion and frustration when you say "Python" and the computer says
Python 2.1.3 (#1, Sep 7 2002, 15:29:56) [GCC 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2 Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>>
etc.
With Getting Down to BASIC, all you had to do was put in a disk and follow the instructions. Almost anyone who could read could do it. This is what we need. For example, I think that when you are at the tutorial website and you get to the point where you type "Python", the computer should reply something more like this:
Python 2.1.3 (#1, Sep 7 2002, 15:29:56) [GCC 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2 Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>>
Good job! Now you've started the Python "interpreter". This means that it is time to start giving commands to Python. Commands are things that tell your computer to do something. For instance, if you typed
print "hello"
next, here is what would happen:
>>> print "hello" hello >>>
Now you try! We've already done the first part for you. Type the word "hello" in quotation marks, and then press <return>:
I think we need some sort of collaborative website to keep track of the tools. Like canonicaltomes.org, for libraries. Like CPAN, but more flexible. I would suggest a wiki -- a wiki allows users to maintain a hyperlinked web/heterarchy of categorized entries, and makes it easy for anyone browsing the site to make a note of something related that they've heard of. You could call it canonicallibs.org or something.
Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 1
True, but this causes problems in a democracy. History has shown that it is dangerous for the public to just trust a small cadre of (mostly unelected) government officials with the clearance to know what is going on.
This may not be avoidable in this case. Still, it would be irrational for citizens not to be skeptical of information that they cannot verify. The public should presume that additional government control and bureaucracy is unjustified until proven otherwise.
The burden must remain on the intelligence organizations to demonstrate their usefulness to the public in verifiable ways. I recognize that this is difficult.
I thought it was incredible. This movie was almost pure, unadulterated sci-fi (with a few stylish action scenes and a crowded party thrown in). I was worried it would be almost all action with no philosophy or plot. Instead, it was chock full of plot and philosophy (while managing to have lots of great action, too). I like the subplots; the more plot, the better.
To me, it didn't feel like "wading through tech talk", it felt like a great sci-fi movie. While I understood what was going on on a basic level, I'll have to watch the movie again to be able to catch more of the subtleties in the conversations, and I think that's great.
How can it do that? It's incredibly complicated. Suffice it to say that LSI processes language in much the same way the human mind does and contains a degree of artificial intelligence that allows it to make judgments about abstract connections.
No, it's not INCREDIBLY complicated (although it does sound scary) and the algorithm (or a close relative) is publically available and studied. A google search for that or for "latent semantic indexing" turns up plenty of research lab pages. LSI is related to "latent semantic analysis" (maybe the two terms mean the same thing, I'm not exactly sure).
I'll leave it up to you to judge whether it "processes language in much the same way the human mind". As for my opinion, note that the algorithm ignores the ordering of words in the documents. LSA has been offered as a model of word learning in infants, though.
The algorithm is this:
Represent your corpus as a matrix, with words as rows, and documents as columns. The number of times a word occurs in a document is the entry in the matrix.
Apply a certain pre-processing transformation to each cell of the matrix -- this is a scary looking formula but it can be written on one line.
Take the SVD (singular value decomposition) of the matrix and then throw out some of the lower singular values (set them to 0).
Multiply the SVD back together again to get a least-squares best approximation of the original matrix, given the constraint that you threw out some of the dimensions (I think that this business of the SVD essentially solves the problem "Gimme a matrix which is of of a small rank, but which behaves as much as possible like the one that I had initially" -- you can sort of interpret "rank" as "simplicity", so you are sort of approximating the original matrix with a simpler one).
Now you have a vector for each document. Consider the similarity of two documents to be given by the similarity between their vectors ("similarity" between vectors could be taken by the cosine between vectors).
In America the last presidential election was about 50/50 republican/democrat; so I don't see why you think liberalism has lost its relevancy. The republicans happen to have a small majority, but the popular opinion is generally split.
Is there a problem here? This seems like an insightful and well-thought out piece (thank you for bringing it to our attention).
Some other comments take issue with details like spelling and punctuation, but I found the information was communicated effectively and the minor errors weren't too annoying.
> This is too technical to discuss in email, > please call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx. > PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical?
I am a student so perhaps my experience is different (and less) than yours, however, i find that it takes much longer to explain some things over email than it does face-to-face.
My theory is that there is quicker feedback face-to-face. If you are not sure exactly how much the other person already understands, this can be ascertained in as little as half a minute. Worse, sometimes you don't even consider the possibility that the other person doesn't know something -- face-to-face, you usually find this out after about a minute even so.
Finally, sometimes the direction the conversation will take branches frequently (as in many tech support conversations, where every few seconds there is a new question, and the rest of the conversation is totally different depending on each answer).
All of these "quick-feedback" benefits would be hard to duplicate over email (if you tried, you would end up, at the least, having 50 one-sentence email exchanges with annoying things like "so, the basic idea of the ____ system is ____; do you understand that, or should i elaborate before moving on?"). The result is that people often forgo feedback altogether and try to write an email that takes account of all possible situations. Of course, this takes a lot longer.
Hence, phone calls are much more efficient in some situations.
If anyone needs them, I still have a tarball of the Crit sources. Drop me an email if you want a copy -- my email's on my webpage.
I've been thinking about hacking the Crit proxy server to serve as a proxy for Annotea, obviating the need for browser support (maybe Google could run such a gateway someday). But I don't think I'll have time to.
Yes, I agree, in fact I think annotation will be huge. The Annotea project seems to be the one with standardization body support. WebQuotes isn't really intentional annotation and so is somewhat different.
My personal feeling is that the main problem with annotation will be having popular pages getting cluttered with too many annotations. "Subscribing" to various annotation servers (with different moderation criteria) is maybe the solution. I also propose that some of the annotation servers themselves should be wikis; i.e. the server should use the wiki consensus-based approach to creating/editing/moderating the annotations which it serves.
Is there a slashdot forum for commenting on slashdot itself, b/c o.w. we'll have to continue to sneak in such discussion as a sideshow to other topics?
Anyhow, what I was going to say is:
Sure, sometimes elitists will mod down a post they don't agree with (asy, almost anything pro-Microsoft) but for the most part the things that get modded down are either stupid, inflamitory, insulting, off-topic etc...
I mod down things that are rated 5 that I don't think are worth reading, rather than just things that I think are stupid, off-topic, etc. Why? Because I have found that there are too many 5-rated posts in most stories. So many that I don't have time to read any of them for most stories. My ideal slashdot would have maybe 6 5-rated posts per story. I make it a point to mod down 5 comments that I don't think were worth my time to read, particularly in stories with lots of 5-rated comments.
If everyone stuck to a philosophy of "only mod down if the post has some sort of problem, not just because you think it is rated too highly", then the numbers of 5-rated comments would scale with the size of the community. The solution is either to increase the number of rating levels proportional to the size of the community (which we don't have control over), or to mod down when there are too many 5s. I think we should do the latter.
I think this is a great idea. I've emailed my Rep, Anna Eshoo (maybe I'll call too), in support of this proposal and I encourage others to do the same.
Of course, what I really think we need is to have actually reasonable copyright terms, like 14 years. And I also like the ideas which others have suggested below about a series of increasing renewal fees. But I agree that something is better than nothing, and, unlike some other slashdot readers, I feel that time is not on our side and that the momentum around this issue will quickly dissipate (because the issue is so esoteric).
And I feel that the Eric Eldred Act is much more likely to suceed than either a flat 14 year term or a series of increasing fees. Although much, much better for society, both of those proposals would make some media companies actually have to pay some money in some cases; this one barely costs them anything, but benefits the public enormously.
By far the scariest thing about this project is the huge all-seeing pyramid logo on the IAO homepage. Maybe I'd better reread the Illuminatus trilogy sometime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
See MeatBall:ElectronicDemocracy for relevant links.
I particularly draw your attention to NetConference Plus, and to Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy wiki section.
Also, there is a wiki effort to become a virtual nation state, called AnewGo, although it's quiescent right now.
Finally, I've just begun work on a software inference engine, Parliament, that would assist in the application of parlimentary procedure to an online legislative body. The core engine could also be used as an assistant to humans during a live meeting (which is in fact the way that I'm developing it first).
You may be interested in the WikiGateway project.
l ?W ikiGateway
http://interwiki.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/wiki.p
WikiGateway is a library of functions which allows you to act as a client to a wiki website, executing operations like getPage, putPage, and getRecentChanges. WikiGateway translates your requests into the idiosyncratic HTML form interfaces of various popular wiki servers. The wiki which you are accessing doesn't have to know about WikiGateway; it sees you as just another user. Basically, WikiGateway does Wiki I/O and import/export.
It can be used either as a Perl module or a web service (Atom or XML-RPC). Command-line client coming soon.
Great ideas. You may be interested in the wiki pages MeatBall:RatingGroups and MeatBall:WebOfTrustModeration where there is discussion of similar ideas.
But it doesn't have to be. Society already has established institutions for paying people to spend their lives producing information for the public good. The university system.
Free software should be a professional specialty within academia. There should be computer science professors and phD students whose mandate is not to discover only original results, but rather to implement known results well in the form of free software.
Structurally, the economics of free software production are identical to those of science. Both free software and scientific knowledge are "public goods". Once one person produces an piece of information, the marginal cost of reproducing the information is zero, and the knowledge becomes freely available to all. That is why the government finds it worthwhile to give money for the production of scientific knowledge.
Like science, the production of free software is a collaborative venture where publication is central. Like science, the system functions best when individual producers have a substantial amount of creative freedom to choose which projects to work on. Like science, it would be impractical for practitioners to do what is needed on their own, or in their spare time.
It is inefficient for society to reinvent the wheel in terms of funding free software. We shouldn't try to duplicate the university system by creating a separate ecology of free software organizations funding developers, and free software foundations making grants. Free software developers should be employed as professors in the university system.
I predict that the first university to appoint a professor of open source will quickly generate a flurry of publicity, and will, if they choose, become a hub for open source development. Such a move would be immensely attractive to students, as many computer science students intend to be industry programms, and would be better served by hands-on experience as a real team members in a real open-source project than by spending all their time on theory. The universities to appoint professors of open source will see their the quality and quantity of their applicants go way up. A second-tier university might be instantly transformed into a first-tier one, at least as far as the desirability of the computer science department goes.
This won't happen on its own. Although the economics are similar, free software is not research, and there is much competition in universities over what sort of professor to give open spots to. What is needed is a campaign to raise enough money to endow a new chair of computer science. This will be expensive (about a million dollars at the cheaper places). But if we as a community raised 100,000 EUR in just seven weeks to buy Blender, then surely we can raise ten times that amount over the course of a year. But we won't have to keep doing this indefinitely. After there are a couple of free-software professors, the movement will take on momentum in the academic community, and other universities will begin appointing professors with "free software" duties on their own in order to remain competitive.
I am considering starting a fund to collect donations for the endowment of a Chair of Free Software at some university. For the sake of compromise, I think it would be wise to allow the university to require that, beyond teaching, 50% of the professor's time be devoted to traditional computer science research, and 50% to free software efforts. Please let me know if you would be interested; my email can be found on my web page.
Sounds like the sort of problem that a system like CanonicalTomes would be good for. Canonical tomes is for books. Anyone up for making a similar site for "canonical papers"?
Sorry, perhaps I am dense, or I didn't spend enough time looking at Postdoc and Diracian. 3d17 allows people to propose modifications to a document, and then others vote on those modifications. I couldn't find similar functionality in either of these links; postdoc seems to allow modifications but no voting, and I couldn't find anything in Diracian.
If you just want to modify a document without voting, wiki does that just fine. The innovation in 3d17 is that it allows voting on the modifications.
after the Atom standard is implemented there will be a common protocol. i think we may need to start using captchas.
Also, the system is built so that the community can modify the system's own code. It's called " Community Programmable Wiki".
When I was little, my dad got an Apple IIc. It came with a bunch of disks. The Apple at Work, The Apple at Play, Introduction, The Inside Story, Exploring Apple Logo, and Getting down to BASIC, among others. These were what got me into programming, particularly the "Getting down to BASIC" disk.
The two best things about the "Getting down to BASIC" tutorial were:
- It came with the computer, and I tried out everything that came with the computer.
- It was very, very, very friendly.
This is what we are lacking today. Something that most kids will discover on their own that gets them into programming, WITHOUT the influence of an adult in their life to suggest it.I think we need a well advertised website with a tutorial on it like the Getting Down to BASIC tutorial. A tutorial that you don't have to download or anything; the website has it's own interpreter.
Furthermore, for most of the tutorial you shouldn't even be using the real interpreter yet; in Getting Down to BASIC, most of the time the tutorial would type a line or two of code, and then ask you to finish one word or something. You weren't really in the BASIC interpreter at all. If you typed the wrong word, it would give you a fake error message and then explain in detail what you did wrong, and ask for another guess. If you made a common mistake, it had a response tailored for that. It also heaped congratulations on you when you did something right. Only near the end would you type in an entire line of code at once or maybe even a whole short program.
I think just telling kids to go use Python is way off. There's like a million steps in between "go learn Python" and writing Hello World. Among them are "download and install Python", "Run the interpreter", "figure out what an "interpreter" is ", "figure out what a "program" is", "find out how to quit out of the interpreter", "figure out why typing "i want you to put my name on the screen" doesn't work, even though i'm saying essentially the same thing as they are saying in the tutorial, overcome confusion and frustration when you say "Python" and the computer says
etc. With Getting Down to BASIC, all you had to do was put in a disk and follow the instructions. Almost anyone who could read could do it. This is what we need. For example, I think that when you are at the tutorial website and you get to the point where you type "Python", the computer should reply something more like this:
)I think we need some sort of collaborative website to keep track of the tools. Like canonicaltomes.org, for libraries. Like CPAN, but more flexible. I would suggest a wiki -- a wiki allows users to maintain a hyperlinked web/heterarchy of categorized entries, and makes it easy for anyone browsing the site to make a note of something related that they've heard of. You could call it canonicallibs.org or something.
True, but this causes problems in a democracy. History has shown that it is dangerous for the public to just trust a small cadre of (mostly unelected) government officials with the clearance to know what is going on.
This may not be avoidable in this case. Still, it would be irrational for citizens not to be skeptical of information that they cannot verify. The public should presume that additional government control and bureaucracy is unjustified until proven otherwise.
The burden must remain on the intelligence organizations to demonstrate their usefulness to the public in verifiable ways. I recognize that this is difficult.
Yeah, but it's still worth a try.
I thought it was incredible. This movie was almost pure, unadulterated sci-fi (with a few stylish action scenes and a crowded party thrown in). I was worried it would be almost all action with no philosophy or plot. Instead, it was chock full of plot and philosophy (while managing to have lots of great action, too). I like the subplots; the more plot, the better.
To me, it didn't feel like "wading through tech talk", it felt like a great sci-fi movie. While I understood what was going on on a basic level, I'll have to watch the movie again to be able to catch more of the subtleties in the conversations, and I think that's great.
No, it's not INCREDIBLY complicated (although it does sound scary) and the algorithm (or a close relative) is publically available and studied. A google search for that or for "latent semantic indexing" turns up plenty of research lab pages. LSI is related to "latent semantic analysis" (maybe the two terms mean the same thing, I'm not exactly sure).
I'll leave it up to you to judge whether it "processes language in much the same way the human mind". As for my opinion, note that the algorithm ignores the ordering of words in the documents. LSA has been offered as a model of word learning in infants, though.
The algorithm is this:
- Represent your corpus as a matrix, with words as rows, and documents as columns. The number of times a word occurs in a document is the entry in the matrix.
- Apply a certain pre-processing transformation to each cell of the matrix -- this is a scary looking formula but it can be written on one line.
- Take the SVD (singular value decomposition) of the matrix and then throw out some of the lower singular values (set them to 0).
- Multiply the SVD back together again to get a least-squares best approximation of the original matrix, given the constraint that you threw out some of the dimensions (I think that this business of the SVD essentially solves the problem "Gimme a matrix which is of of a small rank, but which behaves as much as possible like the one that I had initially" -- you can sort of interpret "rank" as "simplicity", so you are sort of approximating the original matrix with a simpler one).
- Now you have a vector for each document. Consider the similarity of two documents to be given by the similarity between their vectors ("similarity" between vectors could be taken by the cosine between vectors).
Apologies if I've made any mistakes. Here's one paper that describes the actual algorithm (and gives the preprocessing formula, which I haven't stated here): Landauer, T. K., Laham, D., & Foltz, P. W., (1998). Learning human-like knowledge by Singular Value Decomposition: A progress report.In America the last presidential election was about 50/50 republican/democrat; so I don't see why you think liberalism has lost its relevancy. The republicans happen to have a small majority, but the popular opinion is generally split.
Is there a problem here? This seems like an insightful and well-thought out piece (thank you for bringing it to our attention).
Some other comments take issue with details like spelling and punctuation, but I found the information was communicated effectively and the minor errors weren't too annoying.
> This is too technical to discuss in email,
> please call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.
> PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical?
I am a student so perhaps my experience is different (and less) than yours, however, i find that it takes much longer to explain some things over email than it does face-to-face.
My theory is that there is quicker feedback face-to-face. If you are not sure exactly how much the other person already understands, this can be ascertained in as little as half a minute. Worse, sometimes you don't even consider the possibility that the other person doesn't know something -- face-to-face, you usually find this out after about a minute even so.
Finally, sometimes the direction the conversation will take branches frequently (as in many tech support conversations, where every few seconds there is a new question, and the rest of the conversation is totally different depending on each answer).
All of these "quick-feedback" benefits would be hard to duplicate over email (if you tried, you would end up, at the least, having 50 one-sentence email exchanges with annoying things like "so, the basic idea of the ____ system is ____; do you understand that, or should i elaborate before moving on?"). The result is that people often forgo feedback altogether and try to write an email that takes account of all possible situations. Of course, this takes a lot longer.
Hence, phone calls are much more efficient in some situations.
If anyone needs them, I still have a tarball of the Crit sources. Drop me an email if you want a copy -- my email's on my webpage.
I've been thinking about hacking the Crit proxy server to serve as a proxy for Annotea, obviating the need for browser support (maybe Google could run such a gateway someday). But I don't think I'll have time to.
Yes, I agree, in fact I think annotation will be huge. The Annotea project seems to be the one with standardization body support. WebQuotes isn't really intentional annotation and so is somewhat different.
My personal feeling is that the main problem with annotation will be having popular pages getting cluttered with too many annotations. "Subscribing" to various annotation servers (with different moderation criteria) is maybe the solution. I also propose that some of the annotation servers themselves should be wikis; i.e. the server should use the wiki consensus-based approach to creating/editing/moderating the annotations which it serves.
I find this site to be on the forefront of reputation technologies: PeerFear.org
Anyhow, what I was going to say is:
Sure, sometimes elitists will mod down a post they don't agree with (asy, almost anything pro-Microsoft) but for the most part the things that get modded down are either stupid, inflamitory, insulting, off-topic etc...
I mod down things that are rated 5 that I don't think are worth reading, rather than just things that I think are stupid, off-topic, etc. Why? Because I have found that there are too many 5-rated posts in most stories. So many that I don't have time to read any of them for most stories. My ideal slashdot would have maybe 6 5-rated posts per story. I make it a point to mod down 5 comments that I don't think were worth my time to read, particularly in stories with lots of 5-rated comments.
If everyone stuck to a philosophy of "only mod down if the post has some sort of problem, not just because you think it is rated too highly", then the numbers of 5-rated comments would scale with the size of the community. The solution is either to increase the number of rating levels proportional to the size of the community (which we don't have control over), or to mod down when there are too many 5s. I think we should do the latter.
I think this is a great idea. I've emailed my Rep, Anna Eshoo (maybe I'll call too), in support of this proposal and I encourage others to do the same.
Of course, what I really think we need is to have actually reasonable copyright terms, like 14 years. And I also like the ideas which others have suggested below about a series of increasing renewal fees. But I agree that something is better than nothing, and, unlike some other slashdot readers, I feel that time is not on our side and that the momentum around this issue will quickly dissipate (because the issue is so esoteric).
And I feel that the Eric Eldred Act is much more likely to suceed than either a flat 14 year term or a series of increasing fees. Although much, much better for society, both of those proposals would make some media companies actually have to pay some money in some cases; this one barely costs them anything, but benefits the public enormously.
yes, i agree
I quite agree with you, but I think the problem is that many people don't see this as a big deal. We must educate them.
By far the scariest thing about this project is the huge all-seeing pyramid logo on the IAO homepage. Maybe I'd better reread the Illuminatus trilogy sometime soon.